purify your heart in the most perfect manner when you approach Him in the holy Eucharist. Christ wishes His mystical members — that is, the faithful — to be embalmed, as well as His corporal members, with the myrrh of mortification and penance, according to the Apostle, " Always bearing about in our body the dying of Jesus; that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodies." (2 Cor. iv. 10.)
III. When they had buried Christ, each one returns to his home; for they are not permitted to remain and watch at the sepulchre. Imagine what was the solitude of the blessed Virgin and other pious persons, and how they devoted themselves to prayer and contemplation, " waiting for the blessed hope and the coming of the glory of the great God, and our Lord Jesus Christ." (Titus ii. 13.) The holy Virgin might comfort herself with the words of the Psalmist, " In the evening, weeping shall have place; in the morning, gladness." (Ps. xxix. 6.) In desolation do you also have recourse to prayer, and learn to put your confidence in God alone.
Observations regarding the Meditations on the Mysteries which succeeded Christ's Resurrection.
The meditation of the mysteries which followed the resurrection of the Redeemer belongs to the unitive way. In these exercises the soul unites itself to God by making His will its own, and by adhering to the divine will as the rule of all good, according to the Apostle, " He who adheres to the Lord is one spirit." (1 Cor. vi. 17.) Hence the unitive way has different affections, peculiar to it, which ought to be indulged during the ensuing meditations. The chief subjects of these affections are as follows:
